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> A simple google search of "nuclear vs solar cost" strongly suggests that you are very wrong Kindly show me where I was making a cost comparison between nucl

> A simple google search of "nuclear vs solar cost" strongly suggests that you are very wrong Kindly show me where I was making a cost comparison between nuclear and solar in my original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31430747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31430747 You see, what happened here is that @ncmncm masterfully diverted the conversation into cost and project failures. A typical political argument form when you can't discuss the actual subject. You spent a lot of time researching and composing an argument against something I didn't even touch in my comment, at all. I can definitely get into relative cost discussions. I am not in the habit of making comments unless I devote a serious amount of time to understanding what I am talking about. In this case my research into this was triggered by trying to understand the realities of converting our entire ground transportation fleet (US, 300 million vehicles) to electrics. That led to creating a series of mid-sophistication models to try to arrive at parameters, from technical to financial. For example, my power requirement model, done about five years ago, predicted we would need between 900 GW and 1400 GW of new, additional power generation. I other words, we would have to double what we have now. That's what led me to try to understand how we could go about doing something like that. Solar isn't going to do it. It can be a part of it, but solar and wind are not what people seem to think these technologies are in real life. So, my claim was simple: In order to build a solar system that delivers power equivalent to that of a nuclear power plant you need a system with at least 7 times the peak generation rating. This is a matter of physics and it requires understanding how real-world solar systems work, not imaginary pink unicorn systems. My favorite saying, by Mark Twain: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way". A corollary to this is to listen to someone who has before believing it's easy.

ncmncm 4y ago
If you do not compare cost, you promote irrelevancies. If you do not take into account real-world circumstances, your conclusions are meaningless. In this case, we need not rely on a single solar farm of a size to match your nuke plant, sited where the nuke plant would be. Instead, we have many solar farms scattered widely, thus not all affected by the same weather, connected by long-distance transmission lines and augmented by similarly widely distributed wind farms, and hydro power. In the near future, we will be able to import synthetic ammonia from tropical solar farms to fill in shortfalls. So, whether your straw-man installation would need 7x peak capacity is irrelevant; nobody deploys that way. You don't need all the sources to add up to 7x equivalent; the industry figure is closer to 2x, although there will be good economic and practical reasons not to stop building at that level.
- robomartin 4y ago
  Nice attempt, but you provide no calculations and conveniently ignore the fact that my multiplier isn't based on some seat of the pants hand-wavy idea but rather the most fundamental physics and math related to making solar energy. At the start of that chain of calculations is the fact that a fixed solar array will, at best, only deliver 66% of the energy of a nuclear power plant during a 12 hour solar period. That alone requires one to overbuild the array by a factor of 1.5 in order to get the same energy output. And the analysis continues from there. You double yet again to account for night time generation. You add another 25% to account for energy conversion losses. And so on. My estimate was "over 7x". The US Department of Energy's own estimate sets it at a minimum of 10x and up to 20x. So, no, you are wrong. And, yes, costs will sky-rocket if you have to overbuild at these scales. Even worse if we need to to double our power generation capabilities --which is what we need in order to be able to transition to electric cars. That would require 1200 nuclear power plants in the 1 GW range. If this was done with solar (using DoE numbers, not mine) you would need a minimum of 12 Tera Watts. Not sure we have the land and resources to do that in, say, 25 to 30 years. Again, you are wrong. Do the math.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Again, what matters is cost. Do you need to spend 7x as much on renewables as you would have on your (to date massively subsidized) nukes? No. How much does a GW of nuke really cost, all told, in the US? Current numbers look bad. Disaster insurance alone would price them out of the market. Decommissioning cost is never included in the ticket price. Nobody can quote a reliable price for a nuke in the US. Then, we have operating cost. The more total power you need, the worse the nukes look. Renewable costs are still in free fall, so setting out, 10 years hence, to double total capacity costs much less than it cost to get to that point. Nukes you started on today, meanwhile, would be just beginning to come online, after ten years shelling out for mined carbon they have not displaced yet. Does it seem unfair to charge that to your nukes? Calculations divorced from real-world conditions do not enlighten. We are nowhere near short of land to site panels on -- they coexist, synergistically, with crops and pasture, and industrial rooftops, parking lots, reservoirs and canals -- or of silicon to make them out of. We need not discuss the amount of concrete that would be needed to build out your nukes.
bhuber 4y ago
Thanks for taking the time to reply. > Kindly show me where I was making a cost comparison between nuclear and solar in my original comment Ok. "There simply isn't a comparison between nuclear and solar. Nuclear is a far better solution on all fronts... The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear." Two of the most important factors in choosing a grid-scale energy solution are cost and time to deployment, so they're included in your statement. Perhaps you intended to convey a different assertion, but based on any reasonable interpretation of what you actually wrote, @ncmncm didn't divert the conversation, he focused it on a subset of your claim. > The simplest calculations clearly show this... > That led to creating a series of mid-sophistication models to try to arrive at parameters, from technical to financial. Ah, so we've gone from the "simplest calculations" to "a series of mid-sophistication models" :) > [I] predicted we would need between 900 GW and 1400 GW of new, additional power generation. I[n] other words, we would have to double what we have now. I haven't done any research to verify this, but based on your reasonable assumption of transport fleet electrification, these numbers seem reasonable. So we agree we'll need more electricity generation in the future. I don't see how that's evidence that nuclear is a better source for it than solar. > ...done about five years ago... You may want to update your models, the cost of utility-scale solar has roughly halved in the last five years worth of data points: https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2021/documenting-a-decade-of-cost-declines-for-pv-systems.html https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2021/documenting-a-decade-... > Solar isn't going to do it. Why not? None of the evidence you've provided supports this assertion. > [Solar] can be a part of it... Your original assertion was that, "The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear." An obvious corollary is that we should invest all our resources into nuclear deployment instead of solar. By saying solar can be a part of it, you're implicitly changing your original position. > So, my claim was simple: In order to build a solar system that delivers power equivalent to that of a nuclear power plant you need a system with at least 7 times the peak generation rating. The sources I cited above say a factor of 4 - 6, but it obviously varies a lot depending on climate and latitude. So sure, let's say 7 conservatively. So what? Even taking that into account, solar is still a fraction the cost of nuclear. It has myriad other advantages such as being faster to deploy, safer, has unlimited fuel, doesn't have any significant waste products, has much more predictable costs, etc. So why should we bother investing in new nuclear deployments? I realize you're saying you're not making an economic argument, but you haven't made any other kind of argument either. The biggest thing nuclear wins on is steady output - as everyone knows, we can't rely on solar generation 24/7. So perhaps that's what you're trying to get at? As sister threads have discussed, however, a) we have a lot of solar to install before we have to worry about excess peak capacity, and b) there's been great progress in utility-scale energy storage systems which mitigate this problem.

ncmncm 4y ago

If you do not compare cost, you promote irrelevancies. If you do not take into account real-world circumstances, your conclusions are meaningless. In this case, we need not rely on a single solar farm of a size to match your nuke plant, sited where the nuke plant would be. Instead, we have many solar farms scattered widely, thus not all affected by the same weather, connected by long-distance transmission lines and augmented by similarly widely distributed wind farms, and hydro power. In the near future, we will be able to import synthetic ammonia from tropical solar farms to fill in shortfalls. So, whether your straw-man installation would need 7x peak capacity is irrelevant; nobody deploys that way. You don't need all the sources to add up to 7x equivalent; the industry figure is closer to 2x, although there will be good economic and practical reasons not to stop building at that level.

robomartin 4y ago
Nice attempt, but you provide no calculations and conveniently ignore the fact that my multiplier isn't based on some seat of the pants hand-wavy idea but rather the most fundamental physics and math related to making solar energy. At the start of that chain of calculations is the fact that a fixed solar array will, at best, only deliver 66% of the energy of a nuclear power plant during a 12 hour solar period. That alone requires one to overbuild the array by a factor of 1.5 in order to get the same energy output. And the analysis continues from there. You double yet again to account for night time generation. You add another 25% to account for energy conversion losses. And so on. My estimate was "over 7x". The US Department of Energy's own estimate sets it at a minimum of 10x and up to 20x. So, no, you are wrong. And, yes, costs will sky-rocket if you have to overbuild at these scales. Even worse if we need to to double our power generation capabilities --which is what we need in order to be able to transition to electric cars. That would require 1200 nuclear power plants in the 1 GW range. If this was done with solar (using DoE numbers, not mine) you would need a minimum of 12 Tera Watts. Not sure we have the land and resources to do that in, say, 25 to 30 years. Again, you are wrong. Do the math.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Again, what matters is cost. Do you need to spend 7x as much on renewables as you would have on your (to date massively subsidized) nukes? No. How much does a GW of nuke really cost, all told, in the US? Current numbers look bad. Disaster insurance alone would price them out of the market. Decommissioning cost is never included in the ticket price. Nobody can quote a reliable price for a nuke in the US. Then, we have operating cost. The more total power you need, the worse the nukes look. Renewable costs are still in free fall, so setting out, 10 years hence, to double total capacity costs much less than it cost to get to that point. Nukes you started on today, meanwhile, would be just beginning to come online, after ten years shelling out for mined carbon they have not displaced yet. Does it seem unfair to charge that to your nukes? Calculations divorced from real-world conditions do not enlighten. We are nowhere near short of land to site panels on -- they coexist, synergistically, with crops and pasture, and industrial rooftops, parking lots, reservoirs and canals -- or of silicon to make them out of. We need not discuss the amount of concrete that would be needed to build out your nukes.

bhuber 4y ago

Thanks for taking the time to reply. > Kindly show me where I was making a cost comparison between nuclear and solar in my original comment Ok. "There simply isn't a comparison between nuclear and solar. Nuclear is a far better solution on all fronts... The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear." Two of the most important factors in choosing a grid-scale energy solution are cost and time to deployment, so they're included in your statement. Perhaps you intended to convey a different assertion, but based on any reasonable interpretation of what you actually wrote, @ncmncm didn't divert the conversation, he focused it on a subset of your claim. > The simplest calculations clearly show this... > That led to creating a series of mid-sophistication models to try to arrive at parameters, from technical to financial. Ah, so we've gone from the "simplest calculations" to "a series of mid-sophistication models" :) > [I] predicted we would need between 900 GW and 1400 GW of new, additional power generation. I[n] other words, we would have to double what we have now. I haven't done any research to verify this, but based on your reasonable assumption of transport fleet electrification, these numbers seem reasonable. So we agree we'll need more electricity generation in the future. I don't see how that's evidence that nuclear is a better source for it than solar. > ...done about five years ago... You may want to update your models, the cost of utility-scale solar has roughly halved in the last five years worth of data points: https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2021/documenting-a-decade-of-cost-declines-for-pv-systems.html https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2021/documenting-a-decade-... > Solar isn't going to do it. Why not? None of the evidence you've provided supports this assertion. > [Solar] can be a part of it... Your original assertion was that, "The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear." An obvious corollary is that we should invest all our resources into nuclear deployment instead of solar. By saying solar can be a part of it, you're implicitly changing your original position. > So, my claim was simple: In order to build a solar system that delivers power equivalent to that of a nuclear power plant you need a system with at least 7 times the peak generation rating. The sources I cited above say a factor of 4 - 6, but it obviously varies a lot depending on climate and latitude. So sure, let's say 7 conservatively. So what? Even taking that into account, solar is still a fraction the cost of nuclear. It has myriad other advantages such as being faster to deploy, safer, has unlimited fuel, doesn't have any significant waste products, has much more predictable costs, etc. So why should we bother investing in new nuclear deployments? I realize you're saying you're not making an economic argument, but you haven't made any other kind of argument either. The biggest thing nuclear wins on is steady output - as everyone knows, we can't rely on solar generation 24/7. So perhaps that's what you're trying to get at? As sister threads have discussed, however, a) we have a lot of solar to install before we have to worry about excess peak capacity, and b) there's been great progress in utility-scale energy storage systems which mitigate this problem.